Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery

Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, Pamela Reynolds (eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.Reviewer: Sima AprahamianConcordia UniversityRemaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery edited by Veena Das et al. is third (and last) volume on social suffering, violence and recovery compiled by members of Committee on Culture, Health, and Human Development of Social Science Research Council (New York). Whereas first two volumes Social Suffering and Violence and Subjectivity examined effects of problems related to force, political, economic, institutional power on individuals and communities, this last volume explores how people build their lives after collective trauma or after being marginalized through structured violence.As described in insightful introduction by Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Remaking a World brings together six ethnographic papers interwoven through the thread of narration. The six essays in Remaking a World focus on remaking of everday life after social trauma. The overlapping fibers of ethnographic cases as Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman point out, deal with following: (a) relation between collective and individual memory; (b) creation of alternative public spheres for articulating and recounting experience silenced by officially sanctioned narratives; (c) retrieval of voice in face of recalcitrance of tragedy; and (d) meaning of healing and return to (p. 3).The ethnographic essays in Remaking a World often poetically address issues of social trauma and remaking of everyday life through a uniquely anthropological perspective that explores how violence works on lives and interconnections to break communities (p. 1). This is a welcome contribution in a field dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists whose focus is on documenting, diagnosing posttraumatic stress disorder. The anthropological approach brings into attention issues of cultural representations, collective experience, critiques of construction of knowledge based on appropriation of social suffering. It also highlights consequences of social suffering on everyday life; effects of collective violence and social trauma on individual, and coping with social suffering.After exploring everyday life in context of violence, focus in Remaking a World is thus on mappings of healing and re-starting anew a life disrupted and affected by violence through detailed ethnographic case studies. The case studies compiled in this volume are marked with great diversity. …